Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) systems have generally been designed, manufactured and deployed with a target to serve diagnosis of eye disease in the adult population with a mature structure of the eye. Such systems are typically designed with focal optics and interferometric arrangements suitable for imaging the retinal plane, and visualizing and quantifying pathologies related to major eye diseases, such as glaucoma and macular-degeneration. Such systems are used in practice wherever appropriate, but the visibility of pathologies and the quality of images is constrained by design decisions that have been optimized for the distribution of attributes of the adult eye, as eye disease in the majority of cases is demographically associated with increasing age.
A system designed for a mature eye may not be well suited for a broad range of applications. For example, pediatric applications have their own distinct requirements. The pediatric eye, by definition, is a developing eye, and the neonatal eye is considerably smaller than the mature eye. With the increasing incidence of successful births of premature babies, pediatric patients may exhibit a broad range of congenital malformations and genetic disorders, frequently with a dramatic deviation from normal pathology. A premature baby in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) may be at risk for a host of chronic diseases, including retinopathy of prematurity, that typically require careful diagnosis and management. Furthermore, in pediatric ophthalmology there is also a high incidence of traumatic damage due to, for example, conditions ranging from shaken-baby syndrome to accidents generally associated with small children.